August took his hand and said, “Call me Silas.”

Things Unseen and Deadly

Ginn Hale

 

 

The dead are selfish:

They make us cry, and they don’t care,

They stay quiet in the most inconvenient places,

They refuse to walk, and we have to carry them

On our backs to the tomb…

Diatribe Against the Dead

— Angel Gonzalez

In the predawn gloom the phalanx of armed NIAD agents threw dull reflections across the wet sheen of the narrow streets. A fine rain diffused the glow of the streetlights, making their black-clad figures look like shadows cut loose from the creatures that cast them. They moved swiftly, silently toward the innocuous stone front of a three-story antiques shop.

From the hidden recesses of the shade lands, Henry watched the young agents fan out behind him, filling the narrow San Francisco street. His old trench coat and patched pants hung from his long frame, utterly at odds with the sleek garb of the homogeneously clean agents behind him.

They carried mage pistols loaded with laser-etched incantation ammo. Henry wore masking tape and ink-stained rubber bands around his nine fingers and was currently loaded with whiskey and a sweet, nameless poison. His straw-yellow hair smelled like roadside brambles and the dark soil where he’d spent so many nights.

For all that, Henry easily strode through the shade lands while at his heels younger, far more keen agents crouched and scampered across the earthly ground, no more able to enter his world than could the rain or wind.

Three hours earlier their operation commander—a slim, athletic woman with cropped black hair who answered to the name Carerra—had informed Henry that her San Francisco agents ranked among the top three internationally for execution of Irregular assault operations. They’d all been on raids before; they’d busted illegal goblin markets and shut down soul trafficking rings. They were toned, trained, and supremely experienced at keeping magic artifacts from coming to light while simultaneously ensuring the general public remained in the dark about their very existence.

Between the spritz of holy water in Henry’s direction and her cool tone, Commander Carerra had made it clear that her state-of-the-art strike force did not need the assistance of some shabby relic from an age when Irregulars’ operations had been run on half-assed witchcraft, peyote spit, and blood sacrifices.

Henry had slumped in the commander’s straight-backed chair and assured her that he’d have been happy to leave her and her enthusiastic crew to their modern devices, but he’d been dug out from the field and sent back to San Francisco by Director Hehshai herself. Neither he nor Carerra would defy the director. And they both knew Hehshai wouldn’t have dirtied her claws exhuming Half-Dead Henry if his presence wasn’t in some way necessary. Though in exactly what way Hehshai hadn’t said. Oracles never did.

Still, Henry didn’t doubt that he could make some kind of difference, because really even the smallest thing, an icy step or a missed letter, could save or end a human life. Henry knew too well that it took only one mistake to strip all the swagger and confidence from even the best agent and reduce him or her to a cold lump of meat. And somewhere deep in him he still cared about human lives, even those of these strange, modern agents who seemed so much more like machines than women and men.

But they were human enough, certainly, to err.

Most of the young agents hadn’t noted the thin filaments shimmering through the soft rain all around them. The two who had simply brushed them aside like cobwebs. The threads were hardly visible and appeared to break at the touch of a hand, but that fragility was itself a weapon, producing countless poison needles.

Henry held up a callused hand and Commander Carerra, watching him through spell projector glasses, signaled her agents to a stop. Henry glanced back at them only briefly. Two swayed, glassy eyed, their skin tarnishing blue black as mage poison infiltrated their organs through thousands of needles.

They were already dead. They hadn’t hit the ground yet, but that would be only a matter of seconds. Henry couldn’t save them. The best he could hope for was to keep the rest alive.

He turned back toward the antiques shop.

Millions of the gold threads cocooned the quaint facade of the gentrified Victorian storefront and cascaded down over the door like a tangled glass tapestry.

He focused on the delicate filaments in front of him. This old spell was probably the reason Director Hehshai had tossed his ass on a Falcon 7X jet in the dead of night and shipped him back to San Francisco. He might look like a battered hobo and smell like a cold night in a fresh grave, but old magic saturated his blood. Ancient incantations ringed the chambers of his scarred heart and etched the shrapnel of the other men’s bones that he carried beneath his skin.

Carefully, he reached out and stroked one gleaming thread with the rubber band ring wound round his thumb. The filament sparked and Henry felt a chill shudder through his guts. But he was gentle and slow, never allowing the thread to break, even as he drew it back and caught another around the band of heavily defaced masking tape on his forefinger. Steadily, he chose and captured other strands, until all nine of his fingers were ringed with luminous gold threads. His breath felt cold as nitrogen on his tongue.

Slowly, turning first one strand aside then another, he twisted and unbound the tangled tapestry, playing a game of cat’s cradle, reweaving the web.

At last, just in front of the shop door, he found the knot at the heart of the immense tangle. A ruby nearly the size of his fist but cut into the form of a spider: the guardian of this gate set here to keep other magicians from entering its master’s domain. It glinted and flashed as it caught hints of the power within Henry.

And as Henry drew closer, the scarlet limbs twitched. The gleaming threads that encased Henry’s fingers pulled taut—almost brittle.

If he’d been as sober and focused as the clean agents waiting behind him, he would have tensed in an instant and the guardian at the web’s center would have known him to be something powerful, something dangerous. Instead, Henry went slack as any hapless drunk, staggering unaware into a doorway. Around him the countless strands trembled but didn’t break. Not yet.

Henry averted his gaze from the twitching ruby legs and fat orb belly. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander where it would as he unconsciously searched for the words that the jeweled guardian needed hear before it could return to its deep sleep.

What absence kept it from rest? Random words floated through Henry’s mind, as did half-forgotten promises, old regrets and pleasures. He blew out a soft breath across the ruby spider and faint words echoed back to him. He blew out a second breath and listened more intently.

Henry tilted his head, hearing something fragile and faint. Perhaps an old nursery rhyme, but not one of his recollecting. And then the words came to him.

“This cuckoo’s a fine bird; he sings as he flies. He brings only good news and tells only lies,” Henry whispered to the spider. Deep within its body something seemed to shudder. A tremor passed through the threads binding Henry’s fingers. It felt almost like laughter.

Yes, this was the way to reach her.

“My spider’s a sweet girl,” Henry crooned to the guardian. “She rocks and she spins. She waits on the doorstep to catch her dear friends.”

Henry felt another laugh escape the guardian. Gleaming threads all around Henry sputtered out like spent candle flames.